**From Skepticism to Booming Success: The Unconventional Rise of Upwind Safety**
I had the chance to sit down with Amiram Shachar, co-founder and CEO of Upwind Safety, and what struck me was his refreshing candor. You’d expect a company valued at $1.5 billion, with major clients like Siemens and Peloton on board, to have it made easy. But Shachar’s story is anything but. I’ve gotta tell you, it’s a wild ride.
As I dove into the conversation, I was surprised by how often Shachar and his team questioned whether they were on the right path. Like, many of the time – roughly 80 percent, he recalls. They were working on a new take on cloud security, dubbed “runtime” security, where they focused on addressing threats and vulnerabilities in real-time, inside the system. But, of course, people thought they were crazy.
So, how did Upwind succeed? Well, it all started with a pretty unconventional background. Shachar and his co-founders came from a cloud compute brokerage, Spot.io, which they sold to NetApp for a cool $450 million in 2020. “We didn’t come from a security background,” Shachar says, “but we knew our way around cloud infrastructure.” That experience taught them just how tough cloud security is, and how conventional security approaches often fall short.
But here’s the thing: it was their outsider perspective that gave them the break. They realized that internal alerts, like network requests and API traffic, could provide the context needed to separate the wheat from the chaff. Genius, right? “We saw something others didn’t,” Shachar says. “Inside-out isn’t a complicated option; it’s the only way to tackle the next gen of issues.”
I asked him about the challenges they faced, and he told me that it wasn’t easy. The security market is crowded, sales took time, and clients were hesitant to try something new. “It wasn’t clear at first, and there was a lot of uncertainty,” Shachar says. “But we kept pushing, and the logic eventually spoke to our target clients.”
Fast forward a few years, and Upwind has taken off. They’ve seen 900% revenue growth year-over-year, doubled their customer base, and expanded into emerging markets like Australia, India, Singapore, and Japan.
Their latest $250 million Series B funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, will go towards product development and go-to-market motions. They’re planning to invest in their AI security capabilities and extend their approach to developers to prevent misconfigurations before they hit production. “We’re just getting started,” Shachar says.
You can read the full scoop on TechCrunch to learn more about Upwind’s journey to $1.5 billion and their vision for the future of cloud security.
